Chris Wylie is only 31 years old. He’s a kind of Alexander de nos jours. He’s already been a key player in the decline and fall of the United Kingdom, he unwittingly helped to get Trump elected, he helped to militarise the use of data and not content with all that he’s also one of the first to row back and seek to arrest the tumultuous changes he has helped to instigate. It’s truly a Shakespearean journey (Coriolanus comes to mind), albeit one which has only just reached, perhaps, the third act. Mindf*ck is another of those books that ought to be on the A-Level syllabus. At a time when the teaching of history is under debate in the UK, among other places, the value of a fly-on-the-wall account of some of the century’s key events is invaluable. From my point of view, the portrait of Nix, a kind of grinning Etonian skull, a man with a surfeit of privilege and a deficit of intellect or moral compass, feels particularly telling and indicative of how we (the UK) have got to where we are. Wylie’s observations on post-colonial colonialism are spot-on, reminding us that heritage is a very complex animal. We have entered the Pynchon era when just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you and Wylie’s first person account of the dawning of this age will be a valuable testament in the years and decades to come, if they don’t end up burning it or seeking to scrub it from the data.
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